Black Christ of the Andes

1964

140

Upon her conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s, piano innovator Mary Lou Williams all but disappeared from the world of jazz. The following decade, she emerged from her prayerful isolation with this visionary 10-song LP. Initially an eponymous release, subsequent reissues formalized its title as Black Christ of the Andes—a reference to St. Martin de Porres, a dark-skinned 17th-century healer who symbolized racial harmony and was later canonized by Pope John XXIII. The first track is Williams’ largely a cappella hymn to the saint, its choral exclamations driven by traditional, mid-century pop-group harmony. But Williams also throws in startling, modernist harmonic material, reflecting her connection to bebop. Toward the end of the song, her piano makes a swooping entrance—and when the singers join her, there are swinging rhythms and call-and-response vocalizations in the reverent mix. This rich variety sets the tone for the rest of the album, which moves from the avant-garde solo piano strains of “A Fungus A Mungus” to the rousing and sanctified small-band groove of “Praise the Lord.” In earlier decades, jazz was seen as principally belonging to the secular realm, but Williams showed how swinging compositions and spiritual reflection could be one and the same. –Seth Colter Walls

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For Once in My Life

1968

139

The story of Stevie Wonder’s first decade in music is his rise from young talent to true auteur—no small accomplishment for an artist working in Motown’s famously controlling machine. Wonder hadn’t completed that arc yet at age 18 when he released For Once in My Life. It was already his 10th LP, but this record marked some major milestones, including his most writing credits yet on an album and his first production one. Most significantly, it marked the first of Wonder’s pop albums to feature the clavinet, the instrument that would come to symbolize his creative ambitions.

Song for song, For Once in My Life is stronger than Wonder’s previous albums, but it’s the sheer eagerness of his performances that makes it stand out. By 1968, he’d fully grown into his adult voice, and he lets it soar here, eager to show off all its new tricks. You can hear Wonder take a deep breath and smack his tongue against the roof of his mouth before hitting the show-stopping note on “I Don’t Know Why,” and by the end of the song, he’s practically run himself ragged. Even would-be ballads like the title track get an ebullient, swinging treatment. The last thing Wonder wanted to do, at this point in his career, was slow down. –Evan Rytlewski

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The Magic City

1966

138

Keyboardist, bandleader, and self-proclaimed spaceman Sun Ra released more than 20 albums over the course of the ’60s. They all have their charms, but The Magic City is particularly vehement about being jazz on Ra and his Arkestra’s terms and no one else’s. Named after a train station sign in Ra’s hometown of Birmingham, Ala., “The Magic City” itself is a 27-minute group improvisation, with Ra playing fractured figures on a piano and reeling spacey whistles out of a Clavioline (sometimes simultaneously). For most of the piece, he pulls two or three musicians at a time into the spotlight, then out again; the Arkestra probes tentatively around the neon-light field of the imaginary place their leader is evoking, and sometimes erupts into swaggering clusters of horns. As a further backhand to jazz convention, the album includes both “Abstract Eye” and “Abstract ‘I’”—two versions of the same piece that suggest the flexibility of what a “composition” could mean to Ra and his group. –Douglas Wolk

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It’s Our Thing

1969

137

As It’s Our Thing opens, Ronald Isley catches a woman in a compromising situation. She’s been sleeping around, but Isley preempts any fears that he might rat on her. It’s all right, he assures her: He’s been cheating on his girl, too. And so sets the tone for one of the most exuberantly hedonistic soul albums of the ’60s, a judgment-free celebration of free love and freedom in general.

Autonomy was strong on the Isley Brothers’ minds at the time. They’d spent the previous few years on Motown, where they’d begun to feel out of place—Isley’s untamed voice often clashed with the smoother songs they’d been assigned to record, and the group had grown resentful as the label continually passed its surefire hits to other artists. Without Berry Gordy overseeing their image, the Isleys were free to run with their wild side, writing every song on It’s Our Thing themselves, and concocting a looser, funkier, and kinkier record than anything Motown would’ve allowed. The group would reinvent themselves ceaselessly over the next decade-and-a-half, but It’s Our Thing marked the moment where they first grasped how infinite the possibilities were. They could sleep with whomever they wanted. They could make whatever music they wanted. –Evan Rytlewski

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Crying

1962

136

On the engagement ode “She Wears My Ring,” Roy Orbison allows himself a rare moment of pure joy. “She swears to wear it with eternal devotion,” he beams. Alas, this bliss is short-lived. On the album’s very next track, he’s all alone once again: It’s his wedding day, but all he has to hang on to is that same cold, gold ring. She’s gone.

Ardent devotee Bruce Springsteen, who copped Orbison’s melodramatic delivery on Born to Run, once described the singer as “the coolest uncool loser you’d ever seen.” His tinted shades gave him mystique, but he was a pining romantic at heart, an introvert who could turn a teary pop ballad into an opera for the ages. He wasn’t particularly suave onstage, like Elvis, or even that cute, like the Everly Brothers, but his dweebiness made his tales of unrequited love that much more believable. When he sings “love hurts” in that sterling, warbling tenor, you can practically see the bruises. –Ryan Dombal

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Fred Neil

1966

135

Originally a singer-songwriter cog in the Brill Building pop machine, Fred Neil and his fathoms-deep baritone soon found a more accommodating setting in the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early ’60s. There, he mentored budding young folkies like Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, Tim Buckley, and David Crosby and released a self-titled album that still resonates in its profundity. “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’” remain evocative classics, as humble and mysterious as the folk music standards Neil and cohorts previously emulated at Café Wha? The album ranges from harmonica and 12-string folk staples to ruminations that shimmer with electric guitar lines. Spare and serene yet with an underlying sadness, Neil proved that “searching for the dolphins in the sea” wasn’t just a metaphor but a life goal, soon turning his attentions from music altogether and towards dolphin conservation in South Florida instead. –Andy Beta

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Money Jungle

1963

134

Already an immortal songwriter and composer, Duke Ellington refused to fade into the background, even as he reached his sixties. And with the one-day 1962 session that resulted in Money Jungle, he took the rare step of paring down his big band sound by playing in a trio with two artists decades his junior: bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. Together, they catalyzed a rhythm section that pushed Ellington’s melodic and improvisational chops to the limit. On the title track, Ellington enthusiastically reckons with the avant-garde. The album’s quieter moments—the softly rustling “Fleurette Africaine” and the romantic, subtly bluesy “Warm Valley”—find odd-angled routes towards reverie. The album closes with two old standards from Ellington’s 1930s heyday—a deliriously joyful take on Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” and a lush meditation on the Ellington-composed “Solitude.” They advance the past into the future on terms even a musical forefather like Duke could welcome. –Nate Patrin

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Aretha Now

1968

133

Aretha Franklin’s 15th album, Aretha Now, came into a world on fire. The United States was in turmoil in 1968, reeling from the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; amid protests and uprisings, troops waged war in Vietnam. Perhaps on purpose, Franklin reflected those tensions on her opening song, “Think,” a volcanic soul stomp that cries for freedom.

As the story goes, Aretha Now was recorded in five days under the watch of producer Jerry Wexler, who also oversaw her smash Lady Soul earlier that year. Aretha Now turned out to be a barnburner in its own right, slightly overshadowed by its predecessor yet no less potent. On “You’re a Sweet Sweet Man,” for instance, Franklin sounds especially resonant, and her cover of “Hello Sunshine” might be better than Wilson Pickett’s original. Aretha Now captures Franklin ascending to the height of her power, helping her earn her rightful title as the Queen of Soul. –Marcus J. Moore

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The Gilded Palace of Sin

1969

132

In a flowery West Coast scene that dismissed George Jones and Porter Wagoner as conservative squares, Gram Parsons of the Flying Burrito Brothers treated country 45s as sacred texts. What’s more, he adopted their bedazzled Nudie suit uniform, tricking his out with pills and pot leaves. The band, formed by Parsons and Chris Hillman after they left the Byrds, played to Parsons’ strengths: a deep knowledge of country music, a strong voice, a pretty face, rock star friends, and a trust fund that kept him stocked with drugs and flashy duds.

The Gilded Palace of Sin—the band’s first and best record—establishes their identity perfectly. The warm, loose twang of Kleinlow’s pedal steel underscores Parsons and Hillman’s harmonies. They offer up morality tales about music industry greed (“Sin City”), groupie culture (“Christine’s Tune”), draft-dodging (“My Uncle”), and in true country tradition, heartbreak (“Hot Burrito #1”). They also expand beyond country’s confines, covering two classics by the Muscle Shoals songwriting legends Chips Moman and Dan Penn. Gilded Palace is a testament to the band’s omnivorous nature: They blurred the lines between country and rock, James Carr and Lefty Frizzell, churchgoers and hippie boys. –Evan Minsker

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Jimmy Cliff

1969

131

If the 1972 soundtrack to The Harder They Come spread the sounds of reggae worldwide, that film’s star and soundtrack curator sowed the seeds for the incoming revolution three years earlier with his self-titled album. Jimmy Cliff was already a hero in his native Jamaica, a celebrity since he was a teen, but this is the record that brought the 21-year-old singer to an international audience. It includes some of Cliff’s most enduring songs—“Many Rivers to Cross,” “Vietnam,” “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”—and each one became a reggae standard in its own right, covered endlessly after Cliff let them loose into the world. The album also saw him showing off his range as a songwriter who was equally comfortable penning mournful ballads and incisive protest songs as he explored the flexibility of a sound on the cusp of its breakthrough. –Kevin Lozano

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A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

1963

130

A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector is an advent calendar of tracks featuring the producer’s trademark opulence. But its grand soundscapes, from sweeping strings to clanging bells, would be nothing but window dressing without its talented cast—most notably Darlene Love, whose soaring, bittersweet vocals on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” challenge the season’s easy cheer. Throughout, Spector retrofits Yuletide standards with his maximalist Wall of Sound style, helping the Crystals breathe new life into “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and the Ronettes revive “Frosty the Snowman.” –Zoe Camp

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The United States of America

1968

129

Their name was a provocation—“a way of expressing disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down,” as the group’s Dorothy Moskowitz told Terrascope. But if you were young in 1968, there was a lot going on—LSD, Vietnam, The White Album, Stockhausen—and the United States of America somehow sounded like all of it at once: a counterculture state-of-the-union address. Their debut album was the work of a group of UCLA students working under the direction of Joseph Byrd, an ethnomusicologist and former student of John Cage.

Byrd, a card-carrying Communist, envisaged an avant-garde rock band with radical politics at its center, and from that combustible starting point came a suite of music that pulls in all directions. Fuzz-rock and musique concrète leaks into traditional jazz and ragtime, with Moskowitz’s beautiful but affectless voice a rare constant. By any conventional yardstick, it’s a jumble, but think of it as the musical equivalent of a Rauschenberg collage and it all makes sense. –Louis Pattison

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Live at Birdland

1964

128

“One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here,” writes the poet LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) in his liner notes to Live at Birdland. Throughout the 1960s, John Coltrane mastered this paradox, turning harrowing sadness into sublime beauty and vice versa. Live at Birdland, one of his most accessible and engaging albums from the decade, offers plenty of straight-up beauty, especially in Coltrane’s lilting version of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue” and two other tunes recorded at an October 1963 concert.

But one piece recorded in a studio, “Alabama,” goes deeper, melding tragedy and grace into something epic despite lasting only five minutes. Written in reaction to the Birmingham church bombing just weeks prior, timed to match the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial speech, “Alabama” is played by Coltrane’s classic quartet with both solemnity and hope. It’s a stirring, timeless example of how music can grapple with incomprehensible human acts. –Marc Masters

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Black Monk Time

1966

127

The Monks were rock’n’roll’s original trolls. In an era when British Invasion bands were sparking sexual revolutions and denying Jesus’ chart appeal, the Monks cheekily pledged allegiance to the monastic tradition, foregoing mop-tops in favor of tonsures. At the dawn of the guitar-god age, they wielded a banjo player. And where most young men their age were starting bands to get girls, the Monks seemed more interested in repelling them with caveman-stomped kiss-offs like “I Hate You.”

But the Monks’ novel nihilism was driven by very real neuroses. While budding U.S. rock bands could spout off about their teen angst from the comfort of their parents’ garages, the Monks were formed by five American GIs stationed in Germany, staring down the possibility of getting shipped off to Vietnam. That cloud of dread consumes even the most joyously anarchic songs on their 1966 debut. The opener “Monk Time” rolls out on a bouncing-ball beat like some children’s-show theme song for juvenile delinquents, but it’s overtaken by Gary Burger’s unsettling shrieks—“Stop it! I don’t like it!”—as if he were suddenly overcome by PTSD. Even when not directly addressing the horrors of combat, Black Monk Time is a discomfiting listen. –Stuart Berman

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D-I-V-O-R-C-E

1968

126

Tammy Wynette didn’t take long to peak. She was only just a couple of years into her career by 1968, but already in the middle of a long run of consecutive No. 1 hits that cemented her stardom. She released her signature song, “Stand By Your Man,” that year, as well as her tearjerker of a third album, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, which captured some of her most harrowing performances.

The main attraction is the title track, about a couple’s attempt to hide their divorce from their not-yet-literate 4-year-old child by spelling out the word instead of saying it. Wynette had a gift for sniffing out the sorrow in any material she was handed, though, so even the obligatory covers typical of country albums from that era soared—especially anguished takes on the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and country fiddler John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.” Producer Billy Sherrill helped pioneer the “countrypolitan” sound—a sometimes overblown tangle of strings, choirs, and twang—but with Wynette, he always cleared plenty of room for her sterling voice, allowing every quiver and catch in her throat to speak for itself. –Evan Rytlewski

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Black Woman

1969

125

Sonny Sharrock’s 1969 debut as a bandleader, Black Woman, is a distinguished free jazz record because of three things: the restless thrum of Milford Graves’ drumming, which never assembles into anything as coherent as a pulse; the antlered progressions of Sonny’s guitar playing; and the voice of Linda Sharrock—singular, gorgeous, uniquely capable of deconstructing itself in real time. When all those elements align in “Peanut,” they seem to produce a shimmer; when they stutter and fall apart, as they do often in “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black,” each part separates into its own bracing fraction. That Linda rarely sings any recognizable words is key: Black Woman tries to give shape to a nameless personal and emotional betweenness—between fraternity and isolation, between singing and screaming, between joy and pain. –Brad Nelson

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Something Else By the Kinks

1967

124

While many of their British Invasion peers were hypnotized by the escapist allure of psychedelia, the Kinks offered a focused view of the cruel absurdities of real life. Their fifth album, Something Else, may boast all the telltale trappings of circa-’67 rock production (harpsichords, chirpy horns, woozy sound effects, bird calls), but they’re used to subtly color rather than to distort songwriter Ray Davies’ wry, acutely detailed portraits of workaday drudgery, paycheck-draining impoverishment, and family dysfunction (a subject he was all too familiar with). But on Something Else’s swooning closer, “Waterloo Sunset,” Davies’ withering social commentary gives way to a quiet reverence for his surroundings. Part love song, part urban travelogue, part zen mantra, “Waterloo Sunset” serves the same function as psychedelia—inviting us to block out the bustle and grime of city life and bask in a natural wonder—but with a sobering sense of clarity. –Stuart Berman

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In the Groove

1968

123

Marvin Gaye and Norman Whitfield hated each other, but the producer Whitfield brought out a newfound intensity and fervor in Gaye’s performances on In the Groove. (Gaye later said his collaborator had him “reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.”) The strategy worked, though this album’s biggest hit almost didn’t even see the light of day: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was shelved for a full year before being added to In the Groove at the last minute. The song became Gaye’s first single to top the Billboard 100 when it was later re-released as a single, eventually selling more than 4 million copies. It cemented the singer’s financial stability and gave him the leverage he needed to break free of Motown’s strict quality-control system and invent a whole new take on soul music a few years later. –Kevin Lozano

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Afro-Latin Soul, Vol. 1

1966

122

The title is sublimely generic; the “Ethiopian Quintet” credited as backing band is mostly Puerto Rican. Mulatu Astatke would become better-known for the records he made after returning to Ethiopia in the 1970s, but Afro-Latin Soul is trickier than it first appears. His idiosyncratic style, fusing the traditional pentatonic scale with Western jazz chords, remained half-formed—this album resembles Latin dance music of the period, led by someone learning the jams secondhand. On tracks like “Askum,” there’s a charming sense that Astatke is speeding up to match the tempo of the audience. He wrote lyrics for “I Faram Gami I Faram,” uncharacteristically, and got sideman Louis Rodriguez to sing them in Amharic, along with a trumpeting elephant. The vibraphone you hear everywhere doesn’t comfort or lull; it gives each groove a blurred weight, as if moving through the immaculate lacquer of dreams. –Chris Randle

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Israelites

1969

121

In June 1969, a few years before Jimmy Cliff, Johnny Nash, and Bob Marley introduced reggae to the pop mainstream, Kingston group Desmond Dekker and the Aces cracked the Billboard Top 10 with “Israelites,” beguiling American listeners with an off-kilter, upstroke rhythm, Dekker’s high-pitched croon, and lyrics that linked hardscrabble Jamaican life to Old Testament myths. Dekker had released several Jamaican hit singles through the ’60s (and topped the UK charts in 1967 with the rude boy ode “007 (Shanty Town)”), but the U.S. success of “Israelites” led to a quick LP follow-up helmed by legendary producer Leslie Kong. Far from a simple cash-in, Israelites shows the depth of Dekker’s crossover capacity. Covers of Bill Anderson’s 1960 country hit “Tip of My Fingers” and a ballad version of “For Once in My Life,” a 1968 up-tempo smash for Stevie Wonder, share space with purely Jamaican tunes like the sassy “Rude Boy Train” and “It Mek” (island patois for “that’s what you get”). Unfairly classified as a “one-hit wonder” for the surprise success of “Israelites,” Dekker’s historical role is much more significant: He was the first Jamaican pop diplomat. –Eric Harvey